COP16: Global Efforts to Stop Biodiversity Loss Stalling

Since 2020, the extent of land and aquatic environments formally designated for biodiversity conservation has expanded by less than 0.5 percent, leaving humanity significantly off track to achieve the ambitious objective of safeguarding 30 percent of the Earth by 2030.

Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, stated in a press release, “While some strides have been made over the past four years, our progress is neither sufficient nor swift enough.”

At the COP15 summit held in Montreal in 2022, nations reached a pivotal agreement aimed at curbing biodiversity decline, committing to establish formal protections for 30 percent of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, as well as 30 percent of marine environments, by the close of this decade. This commitment was considered the minimum necessary to prevent widespread extinctions and necessitates approximately doubling terrestrial protected areas and tripling those designated for marine environments.

As delegates convene at the COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia, an official update underscores a stark reality: progress toward the “30 by 30” goal remains agonizingly slow.

As it stands, a mere 17.6 percent of terrestrial and freshwater domains and 8.4 percent of oceanic expanses enjoy formal protection, according to data compiled by the UN Environment Programme and the International Union for Conservation of Nature. This shortfall equates to a land area larger than Brazil and Australia combined, while the ocean still requires a protected expanse equivalent to the Indian Ocean to fulfill the objective.

Compounding the issue, a third of the most ecologically significant regions lack any formal protections, while existing protected areas fail to encompass essential ecosystem types, particularly in the deep blue. Furthermore, few protected regions are interconnected, and only a small proportion have been evaluated to determine the efficacy of these protections.

As Brian O’Donnell from the Campaign for Nature aptly notes, “This lays bare the reality of global inaction. To rectify this, governments must recognize the biodiversity crisis as the emergency it invariably is.”

Additional reports emerging from the COP16 summit highlight the alarming state of biodiversity. The inaugural global assessment of arboreal biodiversity revealed that 38 percent of tree species face extinction risk. As the summit progresses through the week, nations are anticipated to announce fresh commitments regarding protected areas and conservation funding.